At its broad, fuzzy edges, premium mediocre is an expansive concept; a global, cosmopolitan and nationalist cultural Big Tent: it is arguably both suburban andneourban, Red and Blue, containing Boomers and X’ers. It includes bluetooth headsets favored by Red State farmers and the tiki torches — designed for premium mediocre backyard barbecues — favored by your friendly neighborhood Nazis. It includes everything Trump-branded. It covers McMansions, insecure suburbia-dwelling Dodge Stratus owners and Bed, Bath, and Beyond shoppers. It includes gentrifying neighborhoods and ghost-town malls. It includes Netflix and chill. It includesBlue Apron meals.

The Premium Mediocre also sit uncomfortably close to the dreaded automation API and are increasingly aware of the Precariat breathing down their necks:

The dark dystopian winter onset of technological unemployment is not just coming. It’s already here and we’re all in it. The parcelling of human work into smaller increments is expanding. It’s a waymarker to a future in which whole sections of society are subsumed below an API that Uber, TaskRabbit, MechanicalTurk have already played with at the edges. Almost a century on from Chaplin’s masterpiece Modern Times, humans seem once again to be cogs in mass scale automation machinery. It’s feels inevitable that disenfranchisement resulting from growing inequality will lead to militancy from the Precariat have-nots that have slid beyond the API event horizon:

Something has to give. Political leadership emanating bottom up from labour movements is a distinct possibility. One hundred years on from Red October the prospect of Communism 2.0 feels distinct and plausible as more and more fall under the automation API and realise they’ve been cheated. When they do, the backlash against those at the top of the class pyramid may get really ugly. As in revolutions past, this one is likely to be presaged by human feet on the street and streamed on social media but beyond that a lot remains unclear. Recent developments showing how Facebook was used to groom the US electorate in 2016 should give us all cause for concern:

Automation and artificial intelligence are going to have a big impact in all kinds of worlds. These technologies are new and real and they are coming soon. Facebook is deeply interested in these trends. We don’t know where this is going, we don’t know what the social costs and consequences will be, we don’t know what will be the next area of life to be hollowed out, the next business model to be destroyed, the next company to go the way of Polaroid or the next business to go the way of journalism or the next set of tools and techniques to become available to the people who used Facebook to manipulate the elections of 2016. We just don’t know what’s next, but we know it’s likely to be consequential, and that a big part will be played by the world’s biggest social network. On the evidence of Facebook’s actions so far, it’s impossible to face this prospect without unease.

In addition to education levels, human capital models should consider factors like optimism, imagination, and hope for the future. When I say “positive” vision, I don’t mean that people must see the future as a cheerful one.

Instead, I’m saying that people ought to have a vision at all: A clear sense of how the technological future will be different from today. To have a positive vision, people must first expand their imaginations. And I submit that an interest in science fiction, the material world, and proximity to industry all help to refine that optimism. I mean to promote imagination by direct injection.

Amazon

As first reported by The New York Times, someone using an Alexa device will have to say “Alexa, open Cortana” to get talk to Microsoft’s digital assistant, and someone using Cortana will have to say “Cortana, open Alexa” to talk to Amazon’s. It appears that both companies have simply created skills on each others platforms to enable the basic integration.

What should recruiters prioritise when hiring developers? Feedback from real-world devs on StackOverflow suggests communications skills and a track record of getting things done are more important than knowing about data structures and algorithms:

This recent LinkedIn post suggests that anyone sticking at a job for over two years in the 10 biggest companies in tech is beating the averages. It’s not clear how accurate the data here is but it is profoundly impactful in terms of the corresponding downstream impact. No wonder there is so much focus on hiring in these outfits:

Facebook: 2.02 years
Google: 1.90 years
Oracle: 1.89 years
Apple: 1.85 years
Amazon: 1.84 years
Twitter: 1.83 years
Microsoft: 1.81 years
Airbnb: 1.64 years
Snap Inc.: 1.62 years
Uber: 1.23 years

Culture and Society

This Flipboard post suggests the purpose of life isn’t “happiness” or the destination but the journey itself and the narrative you build around it:

The narrative you tell will determine the kind of hurdles your life invites, and clearing these hurdles is ultimately what gives the emotions you feel any sort of real meaning. That’s how their value is earned.